IBC 2011 : RED's new Thunderbolt-enabled workflow

I was in the first group to see the new RED demo reel in the IBC's Digital Theater, in glorious 4K. I was impressed at the quality of the presentation, mostly by the steroscopic 5K shoot they produced, a helicopter ballet over the Los Angeles skies.

The thing that excited me the most was when Ted demonstrated RedCine-X running on a 15" MacBook Pro, with the R3D files playing off a Thunderbolt LaCIE Little Big DIsk, pumped through a RED Rocket card sitting in Sonnet's new Thunderbolt expansion chassis. The 4K images were scaled down and played back out the HD-SDI outputs of the RED Rocket to the projector. It was beautiful. Finally, a high-end RED workflow that's portable.

What does this mean for Smoke? Smoke on Mac supports the RED Rocket for real-time debayering of R3D files inside the application. This Sonnet box ties in directly with our whole approach to Smoke running on MacBook Pro's, fully utilizing Thunderbolt's potential. I'm going to let the hardware guys do their testing before I can say that we officially support it, but stay tuned for news on that front.